Ray McNulty: It's tough for these Mets to be relevant in New York

PORT ST. LUCIE - Another Grapefruit League season has begun on the Treasure Coast, where, not too long ago, I was among the baseball writers churning out all those spring-training stories for one of New York's big-city dailies.

So I, as much as anyone, appreciate the challenge ... and their efforts.

Especially here.

Particularly now.

And here's why: Barring some wildly unlikely twists of fate, the Mets aren't going to win the National League East title this season. They're not going to the playoffs. They might not finish above .500.

Conversely, they're not going to be nearly as bad as many of you transplanted New Yorkers might think. Their season will not be another train wreck.

My guess is, by the time September rolls around, you'll feel a lot better about these Mets than you did about all those overpriced, underachieving teams of the frustrating and forgettable Omar Minaya Era.

That's good for you, the fans.

It's not so good, however, for the writers who are forced to scour the clubhouse for compelling story lines capable of competing with all the marquee headlines coming out of Tampa, where the star-studded, sick-money Yankees are reloading for another run at the World Series.

Let's face it: There are only so many must-read stories to be written about the merits of trading David Wright, the status of Johan Santana's surgically repaired left shoulder and the damage done to the finances of the Mets' owners by the Bernie Madoff scandal.

Then what?

Then, the Mets have a real chance to become irrelevant again, buried deep inside the sports section, lost in the pinstriped prose penned in the Bronx.

In New York, the Yankees are a story, win or lose, because they are expected to win and win big. The Mets, who aren't expected to do anything special this season, become a story only if they're surprisingly good or embarrassingly bad.

Probably, they won't be either.

Oh, you Mets fans can hope — which is what fans are supposed to do, particularly when their teams aren't yet ready to win enough to contend.

You can hope all the young, Triple-A talent assembled by Minaya's successor, second-year Mets GM Sandy Alderson, plays beyond its years, perhaps beyond its collective ability. You can hope the moved-in fences at Citi Field help Wright rediscover his home-run swing. You can hope that Santana, who missed all of last season, comes back and pitches like the Cy Young winner he was in Minnesota.

You can hope everything goes right, so much so that people start resurrecting memories of 1969 and talking about miracles again.

But even if you believe in everything that Alderson and his hand-picked manager, Terry Collins, are doing — both are smart baseball men worthy of your support — you need to be patient. And realistic. And not embrace any grand expectations.

Not yet, anyway.

You can expect these Mets to play hard, to be a tough out, to regularly beat bad teams, occasionally scare good ones and put together a few stretches that will fan the flames of optimism. You can expect this season to give you hope for the coming years. You can't expect these Mets to be the Yankees.

Because they're not.

Not even close.

The 2012 Mets are a big-market team now being run on a small-market budget — maybe because of Madoff, maybe because Minaya already wasted too much of the Wilpons' money, maybe because the team plays too many games in front of too many empty seats.

The Yankees, on the other hand, almost certainly will be in the thick of the championship chase. They'll spend whatever it takes, make whatever moves are necessary, to get to October. They have great expectations, and so do their fans, most of whom believe the World Series is a birthright.

One way or another, they will be the big baseball story of the New York summer. They will own the back pages of the city's tabloids. They will be the talk of the town.

And unless the Mets do something unexpected, there's nothing they can do about it.